Favela’s Reading List

Novels

It was by reading these books that I knew there was a greater world beyond the ghetto. They fired my imagination, and I needed every bit to survive.

• Shogun by James Clavell
• The greatest adventure book ever written, Pioneers in International Trade
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
• Perhaps the most important novel, a hymn to individualism
• Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen
• A great love story
• Bleak House  by Charles Dickens
• The most autobiographical of Dicken’s novels
• North and South  by Elizabeth Gaskell
• The Rise, and Fall, and Rise, of a Self-made industrialist
• The Way We Live Now  by Anthony Trollope
• As relevant now as when it was written
• Of Human Bondage  by Somerset Maugham
• Never let a woman do this to me

Non-fiction

These books gave me the facts that I needed to implement my dreams.

• Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret  by Charles Slack
• An amazing story of persistence in pursuit of a dream
• Pop!: Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy  by Daniel Gross
• The Pursuit of Happyness  by Chris Gardner
• If this guy – black, homeless, raped – can make it, so can I!
• Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big  by Bo Burlingham
• Captures the essence of the spirit of entrepreneurialism
• The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand People Around the World Live and Buy as they Do  by Clotaire Rapaille
• Great Way to Understand Different Cultures and How they Affect Business
• The Long Tail  by Chris Anderson
• Excellent account of how digital distribution is allowing far more different types of goods, especially media goods, to be sold.
• The Devil in the White City  by Eric Larson
• Reads like a novel, weaves a great story about the Chicago World Fair and a serial killer